DDP TODO List

Urgent TO-DO list:

Ruthless stale documentation reaping.

Stipulate and document a documentation hierarchy. Basically, complete
the Documentation Policy document, with the assent
and blessing of the Debian Web team. This involves consistency of file
location in the web area and in packages. There is a draft available
here but needs to be revised yet.

Add a way to manage translations automatically just as the website's
WML sources are.

Determine which information should be included in the CD and
automate a method to create the proper index.
Relevant information is here
and subversion holds some
scripts
that need to be polished and added to a cron job.

Ideas:

The following is just a list of ideas that came up in several threads
on our mailing list. Thus, these may be good and bad ideas. :-)

Implement URN's. This would enable users to check for documentation
locally, on the web site, or on mirrors. Local configuration could be
used to indicate closer or more convenient mirrors or ordering.
doc-base could use URNs to point to documents rather than
using file names.

I thought about what output formats we want to include in the debian
packages (.deb's). We need to include HTML (that's the policy) but
some people may also want to have PostScript or TEXT versions. So I
had the idea of distributing the SGML source _only_ and creating the
formats the user wants to have at runtime (could be installation time
as well as afterwards). This has several advantages:

the .debs would be small

greatest flexibility

we could even adjust links when compiling the docs, i.e. replacing
Internet links to local ones if the files are present !!!

formatting will take a few seconds (not too much but simply unpackaging
would be faster)

doc-base could define the fundamentals of this type of
system, since it tracks metadata for documents.

Determine which documents are actually being used (or sought) by our
users so we can focus on them. That's something that has not been yet
investigated. Some sources of information might be the user's mailing
list (conduct a poll), the web log statistics (of both the main www site
and mirrors) and, since documents are also distributed as Debian packages,
the popularity-contest data.

Generate the information of available manuals presented in the website
by extracting the info (which is provided by manual.defs
and version.defs) automatically from CVS.

Make it possible to track translation status based on information from
the CVS site. Consider re-using the framework developed by
the debian-installer for the installation manual.

Track document 'last-changed' status so that the users browsing the
documents available can determine whether the document applies (or doesn't
apply) to them.

Consider providing documentation for users in non-english languages
(CVS holds directories for some languages and some documentation originally
written in a language which is not English)

Consider providing an interactive mechanism for users to annotate
documents through a wiki-like interface, separated from the main presentation
on the website or using the same presentation. This feedback could be used
by document author's and, even if open to abuse, it has worked quite well
for other documentation projects (PHP)

Have users use a generic bug tracking system for documentation. It
is used for those documents that provide a package but not all documents
do so.